Shooting The Engineer
By ice rivers
- 1500 reads
I keep shooting the engineer. He laughs and pulls his bullet ridden body off the linoleum tiles and says, "one more shot".
When I paginated my original, edited copy, it broke down to 700 pages. I was expecting it to page out at around 190.
That's when the engineer rose from the dead for the fourth time and said "Whaddya think that you're Orson Welles or somethin' this shit's way too long."
The son of a bitch started doing what he's always doing....revisiting.....revisioning.....line editing.......cutting, slashing, butchering.
"You've got a million piece puzzle here and if any of the pieces are in the wrong place or if you have a few thousand pieces missing or if you have extra pieces from other puzzles mixed in with this one, then the whole thing becomes an unsolvable, phony mess."
He started slashing again.
That's when I grabbed his cleaver and slashed HIS ass.
"Maybe that's the end of your goddamned puzzle."
Then I shot the carcass a few more times to make sure
The son of a bitch immediately began to pull himself together although some of the pieces ended up in the wrong place and a couple of them were just plain gone.
I knew the book wasn't finished.
I knew the engineer would be back.
I knew what he was gonna say on his next reconstituted appearance.
What he says every time that I think I'm done with the book, whenever I'm ready to settle, whenever Ithink that nobody gives a shit anyway and that the whole thing is a waste of time pleading seductively for more time and more waste.
He's gonna say "one more shot".
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Comments
The Engineer sounds like he's
The Engineer sounds like he's a chum of the damn woman who keeps visiting me, standing there with her spectacles perched on her nose and her whip in her hand, demanding 'Yes, but what's it actually ABOUT?' or 'Really? You think anyone's going to plough through this amount of verbiage? Never mind pruning. Chop it back to the roots. NOW!'
As you say, they're never satisfied.
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Haha. We've all got our
Haha. We've all got our version of that guy...
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Yes, I think we all have an
Yes, I think we all have an engineer!
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